Highland Flings and Matt Walding

My mom asked me if I still knew how to do the highland fling. What? She says that I took a highland dancing class when I was in high school. And then she thought it might have been when we were living in Bountiful, which would have put me in grade school. I have no memory of that. I know there was a street named Highland, and even a high school, I think. But the dancing? Ballet. Check. Tap. Check. Jazz. Check. No flinging. There was a girl in my ballet class, I have a fuzzy recollection that maybe she took highland dance and maybe once I went with her?

I've always felt like my memory was pretty sharp. This has really thrown me. And here I was, thinking about some more trips down music memory lane....

Cowboy Junkies: Margot Timmons' voice, in general, makes me think of my friend Matt Walding. We went to see them at the Celebrity Theatre, they opened for John Prine. We did not know John Prine. We parked in some guy's parking lot and paid $10 because we saw Margot, et al, sitting outside the theatre and we wanted to say hello, so we pulled into the first available parking spot. If we'd driven into the theatre's it would have been free. Worth it to talk about peanut butter sandwiches and mortgage payments. (She'd just aquired one, Matt and I were mortgage free.) She was very kind. She even told us she'd be singing a couple of songs with Mr. Prine, which was our cue to stick around for his set, though we laughed through a lot of it. Matt shared with me his trick of pretending to know the words to songs and grinning while he faux mouthed lyrics that neither of us had ever heard before. (He cracked me up. I laugh over it to this day.) All to see Ms. Timmons come back out and sing.

I guess that's all I really wanted to say. I'd been thinking a lot about Matt, lately, and wondering what he was up to. We seem to keep in spotty contact with one another. A couple of months ago, I thought I'd found out where he was again and e-mailed the person I hoped was he. No answer. Oops, someone is wondering why I called him fat. (Matt and I have this silly little joke. While in high school, we'd read this title of a play on the back of one of those Samuel French publications, "My Fat Friend". We thought that was hi-lar-ee-us. Thus my fat friend Matt and my fat friend Linnet were christened.) Anyway, he e-mailed me back a few days ago! Eureeka! I found him! And then I was listening to a little Cowboy Junkies and on my way to the coffe shop to use fast internet to write him back, my mom calls with the highland dance thing.

And that's the way Linnet's brain often functions.